“Thank” isn’t quite the word, so let’s just say I want to “credit” Canadian author and broadcaster Michael Coren for bringing the video below to my attention.
You see, earlier this month, columnist Peter Hitchens, comedian Russell Brand, and, from what I can gather, a cast of thousands took part in “a very strange encounter,” as Hitchens put it later, “presented as a debate but in fact not really one, more a sort of combative colloquy, streamed live by Google and Intelligence Squared (…) from a large hole in the ground near King’s Cross Station in London, underneath the offices of the The Guardian.”
There’s an “old Indian burial ground” joke in their somewhere. Surely the locale alone put the curse on the event before it even began?
As the video shows, there were also far too many participants on the roster, all clamoring to be heard on the topic of drug legalization.
Hitchens managed to get a few words in, expressing his skepticism about the disease model of alcoholism (a skepticism I don’t share, for personal reasons, but understand completely, also for personal reasons — AA having been hijacked over 20 years ago by “drum circle,” “inner child” whiners fixated on faddish phobias and neuroses).
Hitchens added — and here Bill W. and Dr. Bob would have agreed, in fact — that addiction has a moral component.
Need I tell you what happened next? Hitchens continues:
These are perfectly arguable propositions and I think I made the case for them clearly and rationally. The response I received was not rational. It was a form of rage, mingled with incredulity. They thought everyone like me was dead already. How dare I still be alive? (…)
[Russell Brand] responded to my point about selfish rich kids with a tirade of personal abuse and the standard all-purpose false accusation of racial prejudice that is the universal sign of a person who has no good argument, and knows he has no good argument.
As his voice rose to a whine similar to the sound of an ill-tuned hand-dryer, he railed at me for daring to work for a newspaper he didn’t agree with (and which caught him out in a piece of behaviour which doesn’t exactly redound to his credit). It is amusing to be accused of bigotry by someone who fulfils its characteristics himself.
Behold, and brace yourself against cringing:
I discovered this video at Michael Coren’s blog. (Yes, he blogs, along with writing books – distinguished biographies of literary greats, along with popular Catholic apologetics — and penning a weekly syndicated column and hosting a nightly national TV show.)
Above the video, Coren added his own tantalizing remarks:
I grew up quite close to the fraud [Russell] Brand. Believe me, his accent, his views, his claim to be a football fan, are all part of a carefully contrived persona. Most awful of all, he’s not funny. Here he is being ripped apart by Peter Hitchens, and responding to an intelligent set of criticisms by accusing Hitchens of being personal – he does this by being personal!
Oooooh! Chippy, chippy, chippy! I had to hear more (and express my confusion about Brand’s apparent popularity).
Coren duly responded at length to my nosy email, writing:
Brand does appeal to women – I know many who swoon.
I grew up in Essex, very close to Brand, and in similar circumstances.
We should begin with his accent, which is a fraud. He makes it sound far more cockney and working-class that it is, because he thinks it gives him street cred; it’s like David Cameron softening his words and trying to sound less posh. Absurd.
Similarly with his alleged love for and knowledge of West Ham football team. Celebrities pretend they like football, the ballet of the common man. But Brand seems to know nothing about West Ham, or the long link many of their fans have had with the far right. It’s another facade.
This pretty much characterizes his entire persona; lies about his background, his politics, his ideas. He’s not left-wing at all, but think that leftism is trendy — and he’s right — and gives him an aura of prestige and danger. Nor is he funny. While British comics smash their way into brilliance, he is still giving 1990s jokes. It works a little in North America, but the Brits saw through him long ago.
(As you can see, football — don’t call it “soccer” — is VERY serious business abroad, much like college football is to Americans. Some of Coren’s antipathy towards Brand comes into higher relief when you learn he is a lifelong Tottenham Hotspur supporter. The Spurs’ nickname, “the Yids,” originated in pre-speech code 1936, “when Oswald Mosley, leader of Britain’s fascist movement, led a march through London’s East End, calling ‘down with the Yids.’” Amazingly in nanny state England, the name has yet to be banned, and is still embraced by Gentile, Jewish and half-Jewish locals, like Coren himself.)
Anyway, Hitchens concludes his column about the incident this way:
The point is far greater than a simple matter of manners. The point is that this sort of treatment is the presage of suppression and censorship. Now they are merely shocked that I still dare to say these things, which they had hoped to make unsayable before now. The long collapse of the remaining conservative elements in the Tory party (now almost complete) means that the spectrum of permissible opinion, in public debate, is narrowing sharply, and I do not know how much longer I shall be allowed to express my opinions on major public platforms. The Brave New World grows closer, and the world a little darker, each day.
Indeed.
Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz had pre-sold many tickets to a speaking engagement in Toronto, set for April 24, but felt obliged to cancel due to “security concerns.” You may recall, as they did, the scandalous police malpractice that marred recent visits to Canada by Ann Coulter and other American conservatives. (It happens to “controversial” Canadian authors, too, conservative or otherwise.)
Luckily for us, Mark Steyn graciously stepped in as Cheney’s replacement — and Michael Coren will be hosting the event (and launching his new book.)
If you’re within driving distance to Toronto, here’s a sneak peak at what you can expect. (Hint: a piano-playing imam…):
And I’d like to extend an invitation to Russell Brand to attend “Steynamite” as well. I’d love to watch him tangle with Steyn and Coren.
Alas, Brand has a tough time himself, getting into foreign countries and all.
To borrow one of Coren’s favorite expressions:
What larks!
Russell Brand is a hideous troglodyte, as far as looks go. I mean, he’s not just not attractive, he’s actively ugly. I can’t stand even looking at him, so I don’t know how he stacks up as an actor or comedian. If he’s as idiotic and shallow as this article portrays him to be, I’m not missing a thing.
Actually, I thought Russell Brand was hilarious in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.”
But pretty hopelessly bad in everything else I’ve ever seen him in.
A change of clothes and venue, some make up and new hair style, a change of topic from doing drugs to doing the nasty, and he could pass for Sandra Fluke complaining about the bigots denying her free contraception.
Yet, Blackgriffin, some women swoon over him. and he’s hideous!!
Kathy, I’ll leave the Russell Brand comments to the ladies. But, thank you for linking to the Mark Steyn interview. He’s as quick and sharp in a live interview as he is in print. Excellent.
Thanks for that science fiction vision of a horrible, dystopian future England. Good thing civilization could never begin to collapse like that just because 18 zillion people cry ‘racist’ as they barge in from the Third World with the stirring Anglo-Saxon reply: “Thank you sir. May I have another?”
Prediction: they’ll be selling doorknobs as Rubik’s Cubes in merry ol’ in 50 years.
– Katy. Ew. Ruined.
What most depressed me about the clip was not the stupidity of Brand, or his blatantly unreal accent, or even his failure to address the question. It was the rapturous round of applause he received for his non-answer. Since Emily Maitlis (a BBC presenter) was in the chair, I assume it was a BBC programme.
BBC audiences are remarkable, however, for seeming to represent the opinions of BBC hacks, rather than the thoughts of those of us who have to pay to keep the wretched organisation going. Quite how the BBC always finds a studio audience which represents its own views, rather than anything which resonates with the man or woman in the street, almost escapes me.
Brand was hilarious in ‘Forgetting Sarah Marshall’ and ‘Get him to the Greek’. He played the same character in both, the obnoxious, selfish, immature musician Aldous Snow. He’s so good in these films because he’s basically playing himself.
He ain’t the brightest, that is not news.
Americans, indeed others – don’t fall for Peter Hitchens. He’s practically the opposite of his late, incomparably more intelligent brother – and I say so despite being a religious believer like Peter, in strong opposition to the late Christopher’s flippant atheism. He’s nostalgic for what I’ve come to call the England that Was, the England that received its death-blow in the social revolution of the pop-culture 1960s. I’m not a fan of any genre of popular music, but I know that the end of the England that Was was long overdue.
Pre-1960s England was a cruel and incredibly insular society. People used the word “foreigner” exactly as ancient Greeks used barbaros and the Japanese use gaijin: it didn’t mean “someone not born in England, or not normally living there”, it meant “someone not natively English-speaking, or of whom it can be inferred, from their appearance or name, that they are not descended from native English-speakers”. France was a Foreign country, full of Foreigners. Indonesia was a Foreign country, full of Foreigners. French people and Indonesians had infinitely more in common with each other than either had with English people, because they were Foreigners, and English people by definition were not.
Dark-skinned Foreigners were often long-standing members of the British Empire, often English-speaking; of course their race made them inferior in intelligence and hygiene, and probably also in something called “character”, but if they’d belonged to the British Empire and spoke English they were trying their best, and the difference in appearance made it easy for any attempt on their part to be received in polite society to be detected as being as comically inappropriate as it was.
Light-skinned Caucasoid Foreigners were another matter: they were simply hated. And that was little boys like me, too. I’ve never made English friends, from those days until now – the violence I was subject to, for all that I never spoke a cross word or raised a hand against any of them (my parents thought that my classmates as English boys would be “Christian gentlemen” and never believed me) have made this impossible.
Hitchens’s The Abolition of Britain makes it perfectly clear that this is the England that he misses, and was a better state of humanity than any other. That included its legendarily bad food, lack of knowledge of the rest of the world, and complete sterility in the arts and literature.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that it had anything in common with the healthy, self-confident America of Truman’s, Eisenhower’s or Kennedy’s day. It was a backward-looking, reactionary society, immured in a cult of royalty, pseudo-gentility and a pederasty that could not even speak its name.
started reading it, quit when the Brand rant mentioned
it is his whole act
a johnny one note and the note ain’t in my key
Tried to watch “Get Me to The Greek” on HBO. Couldn’t stand that nasally, whiny voice, and I think Brand’s looks are bizarre. Also, he has crazy eyes, and I steer clear of such people.